ADL head: On NY Islamic center, we were wrong, plain and simple

2021/09/07 Leave a comment

An example of a clear, unequivocal apology (politicians and others to take note):

Around the world Jews are celebrating the High Holy Days. During this time, Jews focus on the need for Teshuvah, or self-examination and repentance. But self-examination need not be limited to individuals.

Institutions, especially century-old institutions like ADL, also can commit to the practice of self-examination and Teshuvah. And it is in this spirit that I have been reflecting on a stance ADL took 11 years ago when we opposed the location of the then-proposed Park51 Islamic Community Center & Mosque near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. Originally known as Cordoba House, and modeled after the 92nd Street Y, the project planned to include community and cultural spaces with the goal of fostering interfaith dialogue and promoting peace and understanding. I believe the stance we took is one for which we owe the Muslim community an apology.

Further, amidst ADL’s reflection, and approaching the 20th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, our nation’s sudden and disastrously planned withdrawal from Afghanistan is heartbreaking. For me personally, and ADL as a whole, this catastrophe made our Teshuvah all the more urgent.
Today one can see how the Cordoba House could have helped to heal our country as we nursed the wounds from the horror of 9/11. As we near the 20th anniversary of that tragic day, the need for healing remains. Arguably, it has attained an increased urgency after the tumult of recent years and especially now as we prepare to welcome refugees from Afghanistan, including many who supported our troops and our ideals, and now flee the onslaught of the Taliban. Sadly, rather than heal, we have seen Islamophobia persist in ugly ways.
As the leading anti-hate organization in the US, with experts tracking extremism of all sorts, ADL is committed to help our Muslim allies counter Islamophobia. Indeed, we have been doing so for many decades. And this is exactly why, as a dear Muslim friend told me recently, ADL’s stance on the Cordoba House project was “a punch in the gut to the Muslim community.” I hope that by righting this wrong, we can be better allies in the fight against the rise in anti-Muslim hate that is coming — and it is coming.
I say this, because as most Americans were praying for the Afghan people, generously donating funds and preparing to welcome some number of Afghan civilians into our great nation, some so-called “experts” began spreading alarmist and Islamophobic disinformation in shameless attempts to block these brutalized civilians from coming to the United States. Adding to the alarm, these insidious conspiracy theories are coming during a time that the FBI is reportingthe highest level of hate crimes in over a decade.
And that is likely just the opening chorus of anti-Muslim sentiment that I fear will swell in the weeks, months and years ahead.
We’ve seen it before.
We saw it in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks. The FBI tracked a massive spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2001, compared to 2000: a jump from 28 incidents to 481. Muslims were profiled, attacked and killed, mosques were desecrated, slander flowed in the media and even members of the Sikh community were attacked simply because they wore turbans.
And we saw it again in 2010, when a media storm rose up around Cordoba House. While the country was in many ways less polarized in 2010 than in our present moment, it was still a fraught time. A time when you could almost see the lines that divide us today being drawn.
When Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan envisioned the creation of Cordoba House, they intended to foster better relations between the Islamic world and America, and to serve as a public rejection of extremism.
Sadly, it was portrayed very differently. Some polemicists immediately pounced. The media dubbed it the “Ground Zero Mosque,” an unfair name that instantly cast the project in a negative light. Mayor Michael Bloomberg argued for it. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich railed against it. The impassioned families of victims could be heard on both sides of the debate. Other public figures piled on, virtually climbing over each other to be heard. The tension reached a boiling point as local community boards repeatedly voted in favorof the project amidst continued protests and counter protests.
Then ADL weighed in. Although before my tenure, I know that ADL struggled with the decision, trying to balance a genuine desire to support a noble endeavor but also to support the victims and families of the 9/11 terrorist attack who voiced opposition. And so, ADL decided not to oppose the project outright, but instead tried to take a nuanced position, advocating for a location change that the organization felt would help lead to the type of reconciliation the project itself was meant to represent.
There are likely other ways ADL’s voice could have improved rather than impaired the conversation. For instance, as some of the organizers later reflected, more engagement early on with victims’ families could have gone a long way in achieving the ultimate goal of fostering reconciliation and peace. Daisy Kahn once explained how the goal of Cordoba House was to “repair the breach and be at the front and center to start the healing.” Perhaps ADL should have helped facilitate such a discussion.
And yet, we chose to weigh in differently. And through deep reflection and conversation with many friends within the Muslim community, the real lesson is a simple one: we were wrong, plain and simple.
Ultimately, the project as envisioned never came to be — with the development primarily becoming another familiar condominium tower.
We can’t change the past. But we accept responsibility for our unwise stance on Cordoba House, apologize without caveat and commit to doing our utmost going forward to use our expertise to fight anti-Muslim bias as allies.
As we see the signs of another surge in anti-Muslim hate, it is imperative that the collective we — civil society, the business community, elected officials and the American citizenry writ large — embrace the idea and intent of Cordoba House and work together to foster peace.
We have seen Muslims demonized in recent years in ways that make the heart ache — from the early talk of a “Muslim registry” in days after the 2016 election to the travel ban imposed the following year on Muslim-majority countries to the unfounded conspiratorial claims of Muslims invading the US that still show up in the rantings of some prime-time cable news personalities. This is in addition to the all-too frequent use of slander and stereotypes of Islam on social media platforms. ADL’s most recent survey of online hate and harassment found that Muslim respondents regularly experience identity-based harassment. This kind of ugliness seems to be on a permanent loop.
It’s clear that some of the wild charges lodged against Cordoba House — that it was organized by “radical Islamists” and “terrorist sympathizers” — were part of this pattern. And we must not allow this pattern to continue, especially as Afghans seek refuge in the promise of America.
This must start with the Biden administration stepping up to ensure Afghan refugees do not face burdensome roadblocks or are unjustly denied entry to our nation. This is why over 300 organizations, including ADL, signed a recent letter to President Joe Biden expressing “our support for a robust humanitarian response from the United States and our commitment to assist Afghans in danger” while also imploring the administration to “expand opportunities for Afghans to seek refuge.”
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But the work doesn’t stop there. It is on all of us to fight back against the Islamophobic attempts to prevent refugees from gaining asylum. Again, we already see the disturbing “invasion” claim being thrown around again in direct reference to Afghan refugees. Some have tried to rationalize their hate by invoking the White supremacist “Great Replacement” theory. All of it is wrong.
We are better than this. We actively can choose not only to reject hate, but to embrace those in need. ADL’s stance on Cordoba House was an error that pales alongside the abrupt abandonment of our Afghan allies, but all of us should draw upon our better angels and welcome those poor and huddled masses who today seek our support.

Source: ADL head: On NY Islamic center, we were wrong, plain and simple

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Immigration-related party platform commitments: Working draft

2021/09/06 2 Comments

Having reviewed all the official party platforms (save the unreleased Green platform), I have prepared this working summary of immigration and diversity related programs.

Party platforms are largely communication instruments that signal overall direction as well as targeting specific groups and interests. The longer the platform, the greater the micro-targeting, and both Liberal and Conservative platforms are long.

In general, the general consensus around immigration-related issues and thus immigration is not a major or polarizing election issue (save for PPC), as noted by John Ibbitson. And Andrew Coyne notes the same overall, without mentioning immigration”

I have tried to keep editorial comment to a minimum except where a factual or historic reference is appropriate.

Let me know if any omissions or any corrections needed.

Summary:

Levels: No reference to specific levels by CPC, NDP and Bloc.

  • Liberals are silent (save for a false claim of previous Conservative cuts) but levels are known through the immigration plan.
  • PPC platform commitment to reduce levels to between 100 and 150,000.

Economic:

  • Liberal commitments to welcome talented workers through existing Global Skills Strategy and reduce processing times to under 12 months.
  • Conservatives emphasize the priority to be given to healthcare workers and expansion of the Provincial Nominee Program in regions which retain immigrants.
  • PPC commits to increase percentage of economic and require in-person interviews with questions regarding alignment with Canadian values along with additional resources for background checks.

Family:

  • Liberals commit to electronic applications and a program to issue visas to spouses and children abroad pending full application processing.
  • Conservatives, more innovatively, propose replacing the lottery system with a point system based upon childcare and family support along with language competency, along with additional resources.
  • NDP proposes to end the caps on Parents and Grandparents while the PPC proposes to abolish P&Gs and limit others.

Refugees:

  • Liberals propose to increase the number of Afghan refugees from 20,000 to 40,000 as well as 2,000 skilled refugees through the Economic Mobility Pathways program with a healthcare focus.
  • Conservatives propose replacing Government Assisted Refugees (GARS) with Privately Sponsored (PSR) and Blended programs with no change in numbers. Priorities will be the most vulnerable, SPOs with strong track record and the introduction of a “human rights defender stream” for situations like Hong Kong as well as making the LGBTQ Rainbow Refugee program permanent. Additional capacity for the IRB along with closing the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) loophole (between official points of entry) and joint border patrols with the US are part of the platform.
  • NDP commits to addressing the backlog and working with Canadians to resettle refugees in communities.
  • Bloc would end the STCA and welcome French speaking refugees.
  • PPC commits to fewer refugees, declaring the entire border an official port of entry (thus covered by the STCA), reliance on private sponsorship and no longer relying on UN selection of GARS with priority given to religious minorities in Muslim countries and those who reject “political Islam.”

Foreign Credential Recognition: All three major parties with continue to work with provinces and territories, with the Conservatives committed to a task force for “new strategies.”

Cultural Sensitivity: The Conservatives propose “cultural sensitivity” training and matching applicants with officers who understand the cultural context of immigrants, most likely in the context of spousal sponsorship given some public awareness of previous IRCC practices and guides.

Immigration fees: The Conservatives would introduce an expedited service fee for quicker application review and processing

Temporary Residents: Both Liberals and Conservatives commit to a trusted employer system to reduce the administrative burden on employers.

  • Liberals mention the Global Talent Stream focus on highly skilled workers and commit to an employer hotline to resolve issues.
  • Conservatives would introduce standards and timelines for Labour Market Information Assessments (LMIA).
  • Bloc proposes the transfer of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program to Quebec.
  • PPC would limit the number of temporary workers and ensure that they are only filling temporary positions and not competing with Canadians.

Temporary to Permanent Transition:

  • Liberals would reform economic immigration programs to expand pathways to Permanent Residence.
  • Conservatives commit to pathways for both the “best and brightest” as well as low-skilled workers, latter based on labour market data, and those that are “prepared to work hard, contribute to growth and productivity of Canada, and strengthen our democracy”. Employers would be allowed to sponsor those wishing to transition.
  • NDP would provide a pathway to all Temporary Residents, highlighting caregivers in particular.

Consultants: Only the NDP mentions consultants and commits to government regulation.

International cooperation: PPC commits to withdraw from the Global Compact on Migration.

Settlement/Integration:

  • Conservatives state they will support settlement services but with no specifics.
  • NDP states that it will work with the provinces.

Administration (Processing):

  • Conservatives emphasize simplification and streamlining of application and administrative processing, with technology being used to speed up application vetting. The IT infrastructure (the one currently being developed) would record all transactions and applicants would be allowed to correct “simple and honest” mistakes rather than the application being rejected. The Conservatives also commit to harmonizing FPT systems.
  • The Bloc would accelerate Permanent Resident application processing.

Citizenship:

  • Liberals recycle their 2019 commitment to eliminate citizenship fees.
  • Bloc plans to table a bill requiring knowledge of French to obtain citizenship (currently, knowledge of either official language). Ironic, given the Bloc’s persistent in respecting jurisdictional competencies as citizenship is exclusively under federal jurisdiction.
  • PPC promises to make birth tourism illegal.

Visitor visas: Strangely, the Conservatives commit to a five-year super-visa when they had introduced a 10-year super-visa when in government that was maintained by the Liberal government. They also commit to explore more “generous and fairer visas” by more enforceable commitments on length of stay.

Multiculturalism:

  • CPC: No mention or commitments
  • Liberals commitments include: improve gender & racial equity among faculty (Canada Research Chairs $250m), reference to existing initiatives (Black Entrepreneurship, Black-led non-profits, youth), implement the Black-led Philanthropic Endowment Fund, strengthen equity targets for fed-funded scientific research, specific target for Black Canadians and Funding for promising Black graduate students $6m), support production led by equity seeking groups, creation of a Changing Narratives Fund for diverse communities, BIPOC journalists and creatives $20m), and Increase funding to multiculturalism community programs.
  • NDP commitment include preventing violent extremism through support for community-led initiatives, confronting systemic racism (few details), a national action plan to dismantle far-right extremist organizations, a national task force and roadmap to address over-representation of Blacks and Indigenous peoples in Canadian prisons and, working with the provinces, the collection of race-based data health, employment, policing.
  • Familiar Bloc commitments include placing the federally-regulated sectors (banking, communications, transport) under Quebec’s language charter, opposing Court Challenges Program funding for challenges to Quebec laws (e.g, Bill 21), a commission on prevention of “honour crimes,” and excluding Quebec from the Multiculturalism Act.
  • PPC would repeal the Multiculturalism Act.

Anti-Racism/Hate:

  • CPC: No mention or commitments
  • Liberal commitments include: a National Action Plan on Combatting Hate, possible amendments the Criminal Code hate provisions, boosting funding to the Anti-Racism Strategy and Anti-racism Secretariat, introducing legislation to combat serious forms of hurtful online content including making social media platforms responsible for such content, strengthening the Human Rights Act and Criminal Code to more effectively combat online hate, and the creation of a National Support Fund for Survivors of Hate-Motivated Crimes.
  • NDP commitments include: ensuring all major cities too have dedicated hate crime units, establishment of national standards for recording hate crimes (beyond police-reported which already exist?) and work with non-profits to increase reporting, ban carding by the RCMP and establishing a national working group to counter online hate and protect public safety, and making sure that social media platforms are legally responsible for distributing online hate.
  • Bloc condemns hate speech but no proposed changes to the Criminal Code and denounces “Quebec bashing” assertions regarding racism in Quebec.

Employment Equity:

  • Liberal commitments include: the creation of Diversity Fellowship for mentoring and sponsoring of under-represented groups, French language training for 3rd and 4th year university students to bridge language barriers to entry, expand recruitment to international students and Permanent Residents, and the creation of a mental health fund for Black public servants & support career advancement for Black workers.
  • NDP commitments include: a review to help close the visible minority and Indigenous peoples wage gap and ensuring diverse and equitable hiring in the public service and FRS (recent public service data indicates considerable progress).
  • Bloc proposes the use of blind cvs in public service hiring (pilot carried out in 2017 suggested little difference between existing and blind cv processes).

Working table below:

platform-2021-comparison-high-levelDownload

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration, Multiculturalism

Vaccine passports pose an equity problem

2021/09/04 Leave a comment

The equity problems are related to the barriers some groups face in obtaining vaccines. But we do know that vaccine passports result in an increase in vaccination rates given it increases the “cost” of not being vaccinated. And what about the legitimate concerns of the more vulnerable (age, immunocompromised) which exist in all communities:

Recently, New York City became the first American city to declare that workers and customers alike will require proof of having received at least one vaccine dose, before being allowed to partake in routine activities such as dining at restaurants and exercising at gyms. Since then, Québec, British Columbia, and now Ontario have chosen to implement “vaccine passports” – digital or physical proof of full immunization – to categorize which residents should and should not be able to conduct nonessential activities.

Canadians are understandably anxious to see as many of their neighbors vaccinated as possible. COVID-19 cases are spiking in Canada, driven by the Delta variant, with most – but not all – occurring among the unvaccinated. But current initiatives to require vaccine passports ignore the reality of vaccine segregation, and how they could reinforce inequities in society – and how they might not actually encourage vaccination nor stop the spread of the disease.

One of Dr. Berger’s patients in his Baltimore clinic – a 35-year-old – was recently asked whether he’d been vaccinated against COVID-19. “I do food prep at a restaurant, 14 hour days, six days a week,” he replied. “I’m not sure when I’m supposed to get time off.” He cracked a tired smile. “And then I worry about going out, these days.” He explained that was because of COVID-19, but also because of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which has not stopped its efforts to deport the undocumented even during a global pandemic.

In Canada, fear of compromising privacy has already fueled vaccine hesitancy among the undocumented, and digital vaccine passports (which require users to download an app to their phone, and to scan a QR code provided by the venue which they are visiting) has only added to their fears.

Additionally, in British Columbia, the vaccine passport requirement has been applied so stringently that even people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons will have their freedom of movement restricted. Gabrielle Peters, a disability rights advocate in British Columbia, is among them. “[People with disabilities] were completely ignored and now we’re completely thrown under the bus because of concerns about other people,” she said in a recent interview. “How is it that you can make an age-based exemption, but you can’t make a medical exemption?”

These people are not ideologically opposed to vaccination; they are constrained by circumstances and undermined by lack of support. How should we best respond, to support public health while also relieving the desperate circumstances of Dr. Berger’s patients and those like them?

Beyond medical and legal reasons, there are widespread barriers to getting vaccinated. If you can’t get off work because you lack protections or just need the money, say. Or if you have to take care of kids, the bus isn’t running, you’re not feeling well, or you simply can’t find the time to figure out how or where to get the vaccine, given everything else life has thrown at you.

Then, there’s also the matter of understandable mistrust in governments. A person thinking about getting vaccinated also has to trust that those organizing vaccinations have their best interest at heart. But many governments have victimized various people at various times, both in the past and to this very day. How can Black Americans place full trust in vaccinations when they’re being promoted by a government with a profoundly cruel history of medical experimentation on Black communities throughout the country’s history? Which Puerto Rican would not think twice about the shot, given the memory of forced sterilizations on that part of the U.S.? Who among the Indigenous people in Canada would uncritically accept any announcement from a federal government with its own history of forced sterilization and residential school programs?

Technical barriers also underlie the failures that have plagued vaccine passport rollouts in Europe, as well as New York and California. In particular, the U.S. has seen technical hiccups that could have been predicted and avoided. Additionally, IBM – the developers of New York’s Excelsior passport app – have already been musing about adding even more private information to the passport, including health insurance and driver’s licenses. Yet, there has been no parallel effort by legislators to safeguard users’ privacy with legal protections against information-sharing among third parties, or penalties for misuse.

If we must have COVID-19 passports, we must also make them supportive, not punitive. They need to open doors to all the social supports that make life during a pandemic possible, and which so many have been denied: reliable, humane work; food; housing; shelter; childcare; and healthcare. The state needs to provide, not punish – and that would actually help hasten the end of COVID-19.

Zackary Berger is a primary care physician and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Esperanza Center, both in Baltimore. Andray Domise is a Toronto-based writer.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-vaccine-passports-pose-an-equity-problem/

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Douglas Todd: ‘Get real’ estate! Five reasons to doubt Trudeau’s housing promises

2021/09/04 Leave a comment

Of note. Leave it to the housing experts for a comparative assessment of party housing promises and their electoral positioning:

Justin Trudeau has abruptly switched into the role of housing-affordability radical.

But it remains to be seen how many Canadians will buy the Liberals’ brazen new wave of promises — including a ban on foreign purchases, a tax on property flipping and restrictions on exploitive real-estate agents — since there is much cause for skepticism.

Weighing the party’s credibility is crucial since polls are suddenly showing housing affordability (not COVID) is one of the electorates’ top concerns. That’s like the B.C. election in 2017, which saw provincial Liberal leader Christy Clark, who relied heavily on developer donations, turfed in favour of the NDP.

All federal parties’ housing platforms require scrutiny, but here are five reasons voters are justified in feeling suspicious about the prime minister’s sudden conversion to housing activist, a persona he adopted last week to profess: “You shouldn’t lose a bidding war on your home to speculators. It’s time for things to change.”

1. Trudeau has done remarkably little to address an expanding housing crisis

Housing prices across the country have jumped more than 50 per cent cent on average under Trudeau’s watch.

This glaring reality was captured in a recent devastating sound bite, when a heckler at a Trudeau rally in Ontario bellowed: “You had six years to do something. You’ve done nothing. These houses are worth $1.5 million. Are you going to help us pay $1.5 million? Are you, buddy?”

While in power, Liberal promises to address soaring prices have added up to zero. Take, for instance, the commitment Trudeau made in B.C. during the 2019 campaign, to bring in a one-per-cent tax on purchases by “non-resident, non-Canadians.” Nothing happened.

Similar vacuous pledges came to mind last week when the Trudeau stole the Conservatives’ idea to place a two-year ban on all foreign property purchases. Only two months earlier, the Liberals had voted against a Conservative opposition-day motion to do just that.

Many Liberals, federal and provincial, have long claimed it’s xenophobic to restrict foreign buyers in Canada. They’re only now toning down their race-baiting.

The Liberals have long failed to address foreign capital flooding into real estate — as revealed, yet again, this week. A South China Morning Post article by Ian Young showed Ottawa spent five years covering up an old Canada Revenue report detailing how “rich migrants made more than 90 per cent of luxury purchases” in Burnaby and Coquitlam “while declaring refugee-level incomes.”

It also became even harder in the past few days to accept Trudeau’s authenticity on taxing house flipping when it was uncovered the Liberals’ star candidate in Vancouver-Granville had flipped 21 properties. Liberals’ coziness with real-estate insiders runs deep (as it does for many politicians).

2. The Liberals have purposely increased ‘demand’ for housing

It was more than odd when Trudeau came to Vancouver in August and said “you’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy … You’ll understand that I think about families.”

It’s impossible to believe the prime minister doesn’t comprehend that monetary policy — in the form of extremely low interest rates and his government’s rapid printing of money in response to the pandemic — have helped jack up prices.

While the Liberals are joining the Conservatives and NDP in making big pledges to increase the construction of housing, many analysts are shocked that some promises Trudeau is making will further inflate prices.

Trudeau’s talk about tax-free housing accounts for first-time buyers, along with other credits, will super-charge demand even more, particularly among young people who can’t afford to stretch further. The size of new mortgages in Canada are soaring far into the danger zone.

It looks, however, like many millennials aren’t buying the new Liberal rhetoric; Leger polling has found the party has been losing support among young adults.

3. Ottawa has done little to combat money laundering via real estate

Prominent housing analyst Stephen Punwasi says former Vancouver Sun reporter Sam Cooper’s book, Wilful Blindness: How A Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated The West, is “the most important book on Canadian real estate you’ll read this year.”

Wilful Blindness describes how transnational multi-millionaires and criminals, rooted in China, Mexico and elsewhere, have exploited the country’s real estate, which is “Canada’s soft spot for economic infiltration.” Cooper’s book describes many egregious examples of how “dirty” offshore money has been transformed into “clean” money through Canadian housing, especially via property flipping.

What have the Liberals done to crack down on money laundering in urban real estate? Though the Liberals said they would gradually direct $69 million into strengthening RCMP investigation of money laundering, B.C. Attorney General David Eby and others have urged Ottawa to go much further — and institute U.S.-style racketeering laws, which are credited with dismantling Mafia families.

4. The Liberals keep hiking immigration levels

Economists — from banks, universities and developers’ organizations — have in recent years acknowledged one of the biggest factors affecting Canadian housing and prices is population growth through immigration.

Despite, or because of, this, Trudeau has steadily increased Canada’s immigration target since being elected in 2015, hiking it from 250,000 to 400,000 a year, with B.C. an especially popular destination.

UBC geographer Dan Hiebert has found the typical value of a detached Metro Vancouver home owned by a new immigrant in 2017 was $2.3 million, $800,000 higher than a dwelling owned by a Canadian-born person.

An SFU study found “hidden foreign ownership,” particularly through satellite families in which breadwinners make their money offshore, is a significant reason prices have no connection to local wages. It all adds up to help cut into the hopes of both domestic Canadians and newcomers with modest resources.

Source: Steve Saretsky, Vancouver housing analyst

5. It’s worse than ironic Trudeau now says, ‘The deck is stacked against you’

In light of the prime minister showing almost no interest in protecting the young from soaring prices, it was more than perplexing to last week see him act like a white knight taking on an out-of-control real-estate system.

Who knows if the identity switch will get votes? But Trudeau’s latest self-image echoes that of the Liberals’ talkative housing secretary, Adam Vaughan, who in April let slip that Canada is “a very safe market for foreign investment, but not a great market for Canadians looking for choices around housing.”

While Vaughan revealed the Liberals’ strategy has been to support “a very good system of foreign investment creating a lot of new housing in Canada as we add immigrants and grow the population,” he cautioned it would be terrible to bring in any policy that could cause  homeowners to see “10 per cent of the equity in their home suddenly disappear overnight.”

There it is. Two months ago the Liberals were firmly on the side of homeowners wanting to profit. Last week Trudeau suddenly became a champion of those frozen out of ownership.

You’re forgiven for thinking you are witnessing pure electoral posturing.

Source: Douglas Todd: ‘Get real’ estate! Five reasons to doubt Trudeau’s housing promises

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Inger Stoejberg: Danish ex-immigration minister faces impeachment trial

2021/09/04 Leave a comment

Of note:

A historic impeachment trial gets underway in Denmark on Thursday against a former minister who spearheaded dozens of tough immigration measures.

Inger Stoejberg is accused of unlawfully ordering the separation of young asylum-seeking couples in 2016.

She is facing a landmark lawsuit, which accuses her of bearing responsibility for breaking the law.

It is Denmark’s first impeachment case in almost three decades, and only the second held in a century.

Between 2015 to 2019, Ms Stoejberg served as Denmark’s immigration minister in a centre-right government propped up by the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party.

Under her watch more than 100 new restrictions were introduced.

Advertisements were taken out in Lebanese newspapers to deter refugees and rules around family reunification were tightened up, drawing criticism from the United Nations refugee agency.

After imposing 50 new immigration curbs, she stirred controversy by celebrating with a cake.

Among other headline-grabbing measures were the confiscation of valuables from asylum-seekers and a now-scrapped plan to send foreign criminals to an uninhabited island in the Baltic Sea.

Separation of couples

The impeachment case stems from an order Inger Stoejberg gave in February 2016, that married refugees under 18 years old must not be accommodated with their spouse.

Twenty-three married couples, some with children, were separated before the policy was dropped a few months later.

Among them were a young Syrian couple, Rimaz Alkayal, then 17 and her spouse Alnour Alwan, 26, who were reunited following a complaint. They had been forced to live apart for four months, even though she was pregnant.

It has been a long journey to Denmark’s Supreme Court.

Inquiries by both the country’s ombudsman and a special commission concluded that the separations were illegal. Requirements to individually assess or consult those affected had been ignored and breached human rights.

The “Instrukskommission” or Directive Commission also said that the former minister had been warned by staff that the practice was unlawful.

Two independent attorneys then determined there were grounds for impeachment, and earlier this year, a large majority of MPs voted in favour, including Inger Stoejberg’s own party, the Liberals.

She resigned as deputy leader and quit the party.

‘No basis for impeachment’

Ms Stoejberg maintains she was trying to protect girls and combat child marriage.

“Mistakes have happened in the case and those I have apologised for, but to me there is of course no basis for an impeachment,” she wrote earlier on Facebook.

“My political wish was, is and will be that no child brides should live with their older husband at a Danish asylum centre. But of course I haven’t given any orders to break the law.”

The trial takes place at a special impeachment court and is likely to last until December. Thirteen Supreme Court judges and 13 appointees will decide if the former minister has violated the Ministerial Accountability Act.

“It’s about her responsibility. Whether she actually instructed the administration to perform an illegal action, and whether she knew that’s what she was doing,” explains Jens Elo Rytter, a constitutional law professor at Copenhagen University.

Career in the balance

“Very rarely do we have impeachment trials in this country,” says Prof Rytter. “It’s the only trial you can have for a minister who has allegedly performed an illegal action in office.”

This is only the sixth impeachment in Danish history.

Most have ended in acquittal. However, in 1995 ex-Justice Minister Erik Ninn-Hansen was handed a four-month suspended sentence for blocking refugees from Sri Lanka bringing their families to Denmark.

There’s no chance to appeal. If convicted, she could face a fine or possible imprisonment.

Her political career also hangs in the balance and Prof Rytter believes Ms Stoejberg has a fight on her hands.

“If you read the conclusions of the investigative committee that have looked very, very carefully to this case, their conclusions are rather clear.” he says. “On that basis, I would say I would be more surprised to see an acquittal than a guilty verdict.”

Inge Stoejberg is currently an independent MP. But if she is convicted she could lose her seat and parliament will vote on whether to allow her to stand for election again.

“This is a once-in-a-generation thing that’s happening. This is going to be very impactful,” says political analyst Kristian Madsen, who is editor-in-chief of A4 Medier.In Denmark Ms Stoejberg is a divisive figure, but she’s also a political heavyweight with a faithful following.

“There’s the traditional, nationalistic right wing that she obviously appeals to, but there’s also almost a Trump-esque element to this,” says Mr Madsen, who points to her strong social media influence. “She’s become an anti-elite, anti-establishment figure.”

Ahead of the trial she has this week launched a new website, offering paid subscribers exclusive videos and weekly newsletters with her views on her “political struggle for Danish values”. She had sought to have the trial televised, which in Denmark does not happen.

“This is unheard of in Denmark,” says Mr Madsen. “The message that sends to me is that she’s going to be a voice in the political arena after this trial, no matter how it ends.”

Source: Inger Stoejberg: Danish ex-immigration minister faces impeachment trial

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The forgotten Islamic human rights document

2021/09/03 Leave a comment

Interesting:

August 5th is an anniversary that no one celebrates or even remembers: the anniversary of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights (CDHR). It is a document drafted by members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that came to be on the 5th of August, 1990. The document’s aim was to establish an Islamic system of human rights based on the principles of Sharia; however, over three decades later, the document is largely forgotten by the Islamic countries who drafted it, and causes nothing but controversy within the international human rights community.

Islamic/Western divide

Ever since its inception, the UN human rights system has been accused of being too Western. It is a system designed by the former colonizers to maintain what one can explain as a “cultural neo-colonization.” Islamic critics like to point out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was secular and designed to be culturally specific to the West while ignoring the cultural differences of other nations. Although Islamic countries’ delegations participated in drafting the UDHR, their voices were often overshadowed by their formal colonizers. To quote Shannon Dunn “Representatives from Muslim majority states faced the difficult task of reconciling the idea that their former colonizers were now the vanguards of an ideological revolution purporting to assert the equal dignity of all humans.”

This tension between Islamic countries and their former Western colonizers will only worsen over the next decades, and will eventually lead to a clear division between the Western interpretation of human rights and their counterparts in the Global South. As Suzan Waltz documented in her survey of UN records from 1946-1966, there were five central issues of focus for Islamic delegations during the draft of the UDHR, ICCPR and ICESCR: religious freedom and the right to change religion; gender equality in marriage; social justice and the indivisibility of rights; the right to self-determination; and measures of implementation.

Thus, to this day, Islamic countries often present reservations related to Sharia when it comes to key issues that they view as conflicting with the Sharia. Some of these issues are gender equality, religious freedoms, LGBTQ+ rights, and corporal punishment.

Nowadays, Islamic countries do not only issue reservations but work actively to spread their version of Human Rights in the UN Human Rights Council, as they often represent a strong voting block that can undermine any resolution, and citing Sharia and cultural relativism as the reason for such voting. In 2014, for example, the OIC backed a resolution that upholds the binary traditional definition of what a family is, and on different occasions tried to block resolutions that are in favor of LGBTQ+ rights.

The Islamic Take on Human Rights

The CDHR came as a product not only of this tension, but also from the feeling that the Western-designed UN system has systematically failed to address issues of an urgent matter to the Muslim world like Palestine, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Kashmir. Thus, the OIC members decided in the aftermath of the Cold War to establish their own human rights system, which will have its roots in Qur’an, Hadith, Islamic teaching, and the narrative of the Islamic Umma as having a “civilizing and historical role” as a model for all of humanity, as mentioned in its preamble. However, this heavy reliance on Sharia meant that some human rights must be omitted from the document, something that caused controversywithin the liberal human rights experts.

This statement from Iydad Madani, the general secretary of OIC in 2014, shows in what direction the OIC stands when it comes to human rights: “there are a number of issues that go beyond the normal scope of human rights and clash with Islamic teachings.” On the one hand, the CDHR emphasizes binary gender roles, has limitations on right to marry, freedom of speech, and religious freedoms, and of course has no mention of LGBTQ+ rights. On the other hand, it championed collective rights—like medical and care—over individual rights, as it views the good of the greater society as more important than the rights of the one. This is conflicting with the modern Western understanding of human rights, which places individual rights over collective ones.

In 2019, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution that declares that the CDHR is not compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. It later asked Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Albania—who are members of both the OIC and PACE—to distance themselves from the Islamic version of the UDHR.

A tainted legacy

A footnote in history would be an accurate way to define the CDHR. It was mostly ignored by most human rights experts around the globe, its implementation failed miserably, as not a single OIC member incorporated any of its articles into their national legislation. However, it is important to look at the CDHR as a symbolic document rather than a human rights instrument, as it did start a conversation between the Islamic world and their Western counterparts and allowed for the Islamic understanding of human rights to make a stronger appearance in the human rights field.

The shortcomings of the CDHR go beyond just lack of implementation, though. Relying heavily on Sharia means that some rights like freedom of speech and expression will always be omitted and that there will be large segments of society who are actively left out by the document. Islamic countries need to adopt a new document which provides equal protections to people, without excluding those who do not fit the moral understanding of Sharia. However, accomplishing this means national authorities will need to reevaluate how they deal with current issues like LGBTQ+ rights, which are criminalized and punished by most OIC members, and gender equality, which most OIC countries are also the lowest among the world when it comes to it.

However, it is hard to see these changes coming to fruition. After all, most OIC countries are ruled by one form of dictatorship or another, who limit the rights of their citizens to have better control of the population. Sharia for these dictators is just another means to control the masses and to excuse their human rights abuses. A fundamental change is needed within the OIC and its members to promote democratic institutes and accountability of human rights abuses within its members.

In the 2010s, the OIC began a long process of revision of the CDHR that ended with a new document titled the OIC Declaration on Human Rights (ODHR). The document was scheduled to be approved in 2020 but due to COVID-19 it was postponed. Thus, as we bid goodbye to the CDHR, time will only tell if the OIC learned anything from the CDHR legacy and if the new document will resolve the CDHR shortcomings.

Nora Noralla is a human rights researcher and consultant, working on different issues including sexual and bodily freedoms, and Sharia and human rights. She is currently the executive director of Cairo 52 Legal Research Institute.

Source: The forgotten Islamic human rights document

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The Bible Talks About Slavery. So Why Are Conservative Christians So Afraid of Critical Race Theory?

2021/09/03 Leave a comment

Good question:

Republican legislators nationwide are waging a fierce battle to prevent educators from teaching critical race theory—and they’re being helped by conservative Christian leaders willing to intentionally misrepresent their faith for political gain.

Take the Conservative Baptist Network, a major partnership of Southern Baptists across states, which called CRT “anti-gospel” and “divisive” and incompatible with efforts to oppose racism. Meanwhile, the far-right religious Center for Renewing America claims CRT seeks to eliminate the idea that “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And in a new book, theologian Dr. Voddie Baucham argues that CRT falsely creates its own version of Original Sin—racism—and gives no hope for forgiveness. Their theology proclaims antiracist education a greater evil than racism itself.

As ministers and leaders of a proudly progressive religious institution, we are dismayed by how people of faith are warping scripture to condemn CRT. CRT, a framework used in some legal scholarship and rarely actually taught at the grade-school level, has become a shorthand for any curriculum that attempts to grapple with the effects of racism on American history and society. The theory is not designed to create racial division, force us to treat any group better than another, or make white children hate themselves.

At its core, CRT—and, more generally, the inclusive education that its opponents dub CRT—simply calls upon us to acknowledge the realities and horrors of slavery and its lingering impacts on our nation. It demands that we look at ourselves, and our country, honestly and try to learn from past wrongs. This doesn’t just uphold God’s calls for truth; it is also a core message of our most sacred text—the Bible.

Slavery is at the heart of a crucial biblical tale: the story of Moses. The book of Exodus opens by describing a new Egyptian pharaoh who has forced the Israelites into slavery. To prevent them from becoming too powerful, he orders every newborn male to be drowned in the river. But Moses survives, and is later called on by God to free the Hebrews. Eventually, God sends ten plagues to punish pharaoh and Moses leads his once enslaved people to freedom.

Would we say that this story undermines equality because it exposes the plight of a particular group of people? Of course not. But that’s exactly what anti-CRTactivists are doing.

There’s another under-appreciated connection between the Old Testament and CRT: Both focus on the experiences and perspectives of those who were oppressed, not of the ones who did the oppressing. The story of Moses centers the story of the enslaved, not the enslavers; CRT studies the impact of systemic racism, not those who put those systems into place.

Now, imagine the story of Moses was removed from the Bible to avoid studying a painful past. It sounds ridiculous, almost inconceivable. But centuries ago, that’s precisely what happened.

Back in the 1800s, British missionaries made special bibles to convert and educate enslaved people. These bibles—which excluded the vast majority of a traditional bible—purposely excised any passages that could encourage enslaved people to seek freedom, including the story of Moses. These bibles, instead, offered sections that could be interpreted to support slavery. For example, they incorporated a passage from Ephesians that read, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.”

Make no mistake: all people are equal under God. But CRT does nothing to undermine that fundamental truth. It simply acknowledges the facts: systemic racism is a pervasive part of our nation’s history, one that is worthy of serious study and tangible steps to address.

And yet, conservative policymakers are committed to preventing that reality from ever entering the classroom. And they’re not just barring CRT specifically—they’re banning broad teachings about systemic discrimination. Lawmakers in at least eight states have passed legislation that prevents teachers from educating students about the country’s legacy of racism and discussing topics like unconscious bias. For example, Tennessee’s recently passed law prevents educators from teaching that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.” Iowa’s law prohibits educators from teaching that the state or country is fundamentally or systemically racist. About 20 additional states have proposed similar legislation or are preparing to.

From an educational standpoint, it is deeply disturbing that teachers would be barred from sharing such critical subject material with the future generation of leaders. An educator’s job is to expose students to diverse viewpoints, not create a false, one-track narrative.

As Christians, anti-CRT legislation is entirely incompatible with our core religious beliefs. Our religion compels us to confront our world’s history of slavery. It demands we acknowledge the horrors of our past, so we might repent and chart a path for a better tomorrow.

Source: https://time.com/6094044/bible-slavery-critical-race-theory/

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White Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston Picks White Guy Pat Dunn to Represent African Nova Scotians

2021/09/03 Leave a comment

Silly article. He has no African Nova Scotian in his caucus. Far better to judge the government on what it does and does not do:

On his first day in office, the white premier of Nova Scotia chose a fellow white man to serve as a representative for thousands of African Nova Scotians and as head of the Canadian province’s anti-racism efforts, enraging members of his community.

“I understand the emotions of it but [the decision] shouldn’t be interpreted as not being concerned about listening to the community,” Tim Houston, a member of the Progressive Conservative Party, said in a statement Tuesday night. He picked Pat Dunn, a member of the Canadian Legislative Assembly, as the minister for African Nova Scotian Affairs and the Office of Anti-Racism Initiatives.

There are roughly 21,000 people of African descent in the province distributed among 50 African Nova Scotia communities. Replies to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tweets about the decision as well as Facebook comments on Houston’s announcement denounced the decision as “tone deaf.”

Among the Progressive Conservative Party’s 31 members elected to office in August, there were no Black members. Three Black Progressive Conservative candidates had run and lost. Houston said, rather than choose a Black candidate from outside his party for the post now occupied by Dunn, that “our democracy works best when the people that are elected are put into positions of accountability,” according to the Toronto Star.

Source: White Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston Picks White Guy Pat Dunn to Represent African Nova Scotians

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Congress Can’t Solve Immigration. Maybe the States Can.

2021/09/03 Leave a comment

Seeing more arguments in US media regarding providing a role for states in selecting immigrants, citing Canada’s Provincial Nominee Program as a model. Given the political dynamics, hard to see this getting much traction as presume there would need to be legislative authority for such a change:

“A moral failing and a national shame.” During his 2020 campaign, that was how Joe Biden characterized America’s immigration policies in the Trump era. On his first day in office, the new president announced an ambitious reform. The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 would include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. It would raise caps on legal immigration. It would increase aid for Central America. It touched all the progressive erogenous zones.

And it was dead on arrival. “It’s such a progressive wish list that it’s almost counterproductive,” a pro-immigration lobbyist told me. By summer, the reform effort had stalled, migrants were flooding the border, the Democrats were divided, and the Republicans were demagoguing. Just like always.

For the country, as well as for immigrants and their families and employers, the cost of our never-ending immigration crisis has been very high. Among its consequences was the presidency of Donald Trump, who could not have reached the White House without the disruptive energy that immigration unleashed. In fact, if you had to pick a date when America launched itself toward Trumpism, June 28, 2007, would be a good choice.

Immigration was on the floor of the Senate. A bipartisan coalition had revived what was then—and still is—the logical compromise: stricter controls at the borders and at job sites, more legal immigration (especially of skilled workers), and a path to citizenship. Had the compromise passed, “it would have changed the politics,” Jim Kolbe, who was then a House Republican representing an Arizona border district, recently told me. “It would have been seen as putting the immigration issue behind us.”

Instead, the bill failed, badly. A disappointed Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader, said, “I had hoped for a bipartisan accomplishment, and what we got was a bipartisan defeat.”

Before 2007, immigration had been a controversial issue but also a normal one—susceptible to bargaining and compromise. Congress had passed major reform under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, and then a series of tune-ups in the ’90s. After 2007, paralysis set in. For conservatives, the stalemate became emblematic of the country’s inability to secure its borders and enforce its laws. For liberals, it was emblematic of the country’s inability to deal humanely with millions of immigrants. And for moderates, it was a symbol of congressional incompetence. According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of the public wants a pathway to citizenship and better border control. “Everyone knows what has to be done,” Kolbe told me, “but no one has the will to do it.”

This dispute has now inflamed our whole body politic. “I think the immigration debate is a bigger problem for the country than any of the failures of the immigration system,” Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me. In other words, the country needs a resolution to the political crisis around immigration at least as much as it needs a solution to the policy mess. As long as voters believe Washington is too incompetent and venal to handle immigration, they will not trust it to do anything else, and the door will stay open to demagogues and nihilists.

So now what? Plan A, comprehensive progressive reform, will not work. Plan B, comprehensive conservative reform, will not work. Plan C, compromise, should work but has failed time and again. That leaves Plans D, E, and F: piecemeal reforms for groups such as “Dreamers” and farmworkers, and the kinds of patchwork changes that congressional Democrats were seeking to include in their budget-reconciliation package this fall. They may be the best we can do.

But there is one piecemeal proposal that deserves special attention. I think of it as Plan Z, because it reframes the whole problem.

In 2019, representative John Curtis, a Republican from Utah, introduced what he called the State-Sponsored Visa Pilot Program Act. It would have allowed a new avenue for immigration by authorizing states to sponsor people for three-year, renewable work visas. The bill found no co-sponsors and never came up for debate, but Curtis told me he intends to reintroduce it in the current Congress.

Delegating immigration authority to the states is not a new concept; Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, introduced a similar plan in 2017. According to Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, bills seeking authority to issue work visas have been introduced in 11 state legislatures since 2008, and three such bills have been voted into law. But the federal government has ignored them.

One problem is that people just can’t get their mind around letting someone other than the federal government decide who comes and stays. You can’t have individual states picking immigrants for the whole country! What about security? What about fairness? Could a conservative state discriminate on the grounds of, say, race or religion?

But the idea is not really that dramatic. This proposal wouldn’t encroach on the existing federal systems for visas, refugees, or family reunification. Any state-sponsored work permits would be in addition to the current number. The federal government would still vet the applications and control permanent residency and citizenship. Federal law and the Constitution would still forbid discrimination.

When I asked Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, in Indiana, and a former Republican governor of the state, whether policy makers there would participate in such a program, he replied with a prompt yes. “The one thing” keeping Indiana from economic competitiveness, he said, “is that we don’t have enough people with the right skills.” Besides, he added, universities and businesses can already sponsor immigrants for visas; why shouldn’t states have the same authority?

how would state-sponsored visas work? In Curtis’s 2019 version, every state would have the option of sponsoring 5,000 work visas a year, plus an additional allotment based on its population, up to a nationwide total of 500,000. No state would be obligated to sponsor anyone, so states could shut their doors if they chose to. They could favor tech workers, farmworkers, family members; they could even use their visas to temporarily legalize undocumented workers already living there. The only requirements would be that the visas couldn’t be employer-specific (so bosses couldn’t use them to blackmail workers with deportation threats) and that the immigrants holding them live and work in the state that sponsored them.

How would the plan prevent immigrants from moving out of state? Each state would be required to report where its visa holders live and work, and if it couldn’t account for them, it would lose visas the next year. States that administered their programs well would be rewarded with more visas.

In any case, immigrants who settle into jobs and communities are not all that inclined to move. In Canada, which has allowed its provinces to sponsor immigrants since 1996 and which does not restrict where visa holders reside, more than 80 percent of them stay put for more than 10 years. “The vast majority,” a government report on the program said in 2017, “have become established economically, with high employment rates and earnings that increase over time.”

Even if this system isn’t perfect, the politics would be healthier than at present, when the federal government is making decisions, or nondecisions, and the states have no voice. “We’ve been so wrapped around the axle on immigration law and policy for so long that it might be very constructive to look at it through a different lens,” Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona and secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration, told me. “Maybe it avoids some of the hard lines that both sides have drawn.”

State-sponsored immigration is not a cure-all. It would not remedy Congress’s deficiencies or resolve difficult questions about border control, asylum, or citizenship. What it would do is make American communities feel that they have some influence. It might dispel the rancid air that has suffocated reform. And it might begin to free our national politics from the curse of immigration gridlock.

Jonathan Rauch is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

Source: Congress Can’t Solve Immigration. Maybe the States Can.

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The racist history of Chinese labour in Canada shows not much has changed. Deemed essential, but still invisible

2021/09/03 Leave a comment

Overwrought, IMO, in terms of the implications that nothing has changed. Not as much as needed, of course.

Given the examples, an interesting question would be whether Chinese Canadian are employees treated worse or better in Chinese or “mainstream” supermarkets?

Arab, West Asian and Korean have greater incidence of low income than Chinese first generation, but second generation Chinese Canadians, particularly those with university education, have higher median incomes than non visible minorities:

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese Canadians and other visible Asians became targets of threats and attacks in the nonsensical scapegoating of the coronavirus.

In 2020, the Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter (CCNCTO) and community partners across Canada documented 1150 cases of racist attacks nationally, with Vancouver seeing a 717 per cent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes.Asian elders have been especially targeted, including a 92-year-old man with dementia who was violently shoved onto the pavement in Vancouver and an 80-year-old woman who was assaulted and struck in the head with a rock in Pembroke.

A year and a half later, new anti-Asian racism cases continue to flood into Fight COVID Racism’s self-report and witness-report tracking tool.

While these are examples of overt, hate crimes, the type of racism that cannot be tracked, but continues to happen is the experience of someone like Michael. Michael is a Chinese Canadian who has worked in Chinese supermarkets for nine years. He has low pay, works long hours and faces the systemic violations of minimum wage and vacation pay. It is par for the course in this line of work. Michael’s situation is already far better than that of his co-workers who have precarious immigration status and endure worse treatment and exploitation.

When the pandemic hit, Michael saw his pay and hours reduced. He and other workers had to pay out-of-pocket for their own masks and even disinfectant to stay safe on the job and at home. Confronted with the financial squeeze and risk of infection at work, he also faced a growing anti-Asian sentiment outside of work due to racist scapegoating.

Michael’s experience, detailed in a new report Our Lives Are Essential by CCNCTO, is both recurrent and commonplace within Chinese Canadian working class communities, where precarious working conditions and endemic poverty are deep and persistent. Chinese Canadian communities experience conditions of low-income at rates nearly double that of white communities (22.2 per cent to 11.5 per cent), making up the largest population of racialized people living in poverty.

Racially-motivated hate is the most obvious manifestation of anti-Asian racism; the tip of the iceberg visible above water. Beneath the surface lies the far more subtle and insidious nature of racialized social and economic exclusion: elevated levels of poverty, racial disparities in employment, underinvestment in working-class communities, reduced access to health and social services, legally-produced immigration status precarity, reduced support for collective bargaining and morepronounced violations of workers’ rights. The hypervisibility of hate crimes and related calls for greater policing stand in stark contrast to the normalized indignities of racialized poverty and labour injustice.

This invisible side of anti-Asian racism often is erased by the “model minority” myth, which fixates on visible Asians who are wealthy, educated, and upwardly mobile, rather than the poor and marginalized. But the working-class genesis of the model minority trope originated more maliciously. When white settlers enlisted Chinese migrant workers in the 1880s to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, Chinese workers were seen as economic threats because of their supposed inherent “propensity” to be compliant, manageable, accepting of lower wages, longer hours, and dangerous work … all threats to white workers’ chances for prosperity.

Operating parallel to the federal government’s imposition of racially exclusive policies, like the Chinese head taxes and immigration restrictions, were white labour unions that passed restrictions banning Chinese workers (and later Japanese and South Asian workers) from their ranks. The idea of the toiling Asian worker continues to manifest as a threat to Canadian labour to this day — with former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford infamously remarking “Oriental people work like dogs” and were “slowly taking over.”

The entanglements between worker exploitation and racial caricature of the Asian labourer has resulted in a host of anti-Asian racist harms: perpetual foreignness, immigration controls combined with racial exclusion, and the undermining of labour solidarity — limiting our capacity to see workers’ struggles as tied to struggles for racial and migrant justice.

As a result, the successes of Chinese Canadian labour organizing is also lost, from the strikes led by Chinese and other Asian shingle mill workers in British Columbia that predated the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, to the creation of the Ontario Employee Wage Protection Program in the 1990s after Chinese Canadian garment factory workers organized against wage theft by Lark Manufacturing.

Alongside anti-Asian racist attacks, a hierarchy of “essential” work has emerged during this pandemic. The invisible low wage labour that disproportionately relies on racialized immigrant workers in industries like food, transportation, personal support and more. Those jobs were first labelled non-essential, despite taking the front-line brunt of running establishments that supplied basic necessities to us during the series of lockdowns. This Labour Day, in the shadow of a federal election and another spike of COVID cases, the invisible side of anti-Asian racism hidden behind the model minority myth — valuing certain labour over others — must be made visible again.

Michael is not the only racialized immigrant low wage worker whose blood, sweat and tears remains ignored by our political system. So many have been made invisible and isolated in their labour struggles, while simultaneously made hypervisible by continued anti-Asian sentiment.

Only by seeing the labour and lives of racialized immigrant workers as essential to our communities will we recover towards a fair and just society for all.

Vincent Wong is a human rights lawyer and PhD student at Osgoode Hall Law School.

Kennes Lin works as a community social worker and is the co-chair of the Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter.

Source: The racist history of Chinese labour in Canada shows not much has changed. Deemed essential, but still invisible

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